The United States primarily relies upon credit and debit cards having no electronics that are readable by a magnetic stripe card reader. Outside the United States, many countries rely upon smart cards that do not contain a magnetic stripe but are readable by smart card readers. Each option has its advantages and disadvantages, and there are many reasons why both cards currently exist.
It has long been desired to create a single card usable both inside the United States with magnetic stripe readers and outside the United States with smart card readers that offers the advantages of both cards while minimizing the disadvantages of both cards. Such a card not only has the promise of saving billions of dollars a year in fraud, but it also has the promise of opening many other uses for the card, and generating enormous savings related to combining multiple cards into a single card. Yet, to date, it does not exist.
The prior art includes many patents that propose just such a card, but none has yet been commercialized. Given the long felt need for such a card, and the enormity of the problems it could solve, and the attempts by a great many to solve the problems associated with creating such a card, one has to ask why such a card is not yet available. The reasons are many. Cost and manufacturability are two primary reasons why such a card has not yet been commercialized, but there are other reasons as well. Such reasons include, but are not limited to, reasons relating to security, privacy, standards, and several other issues that must be addressed before such a card can be widely deployed.
The present invention recognizes and solves a problem that has prevented electronic smart cards from broadcasting a magnetic stripe data packet readable by a magnetic card reader during a swipe of the electronic card past a magnetic reader head.